Breda O'Brien
The View
Single people have played a very important role in my life, beginning with my much-loved aunt, Kathleen O’Brien, who died at the early age of 71. Kathleen was a fascinating figure to me as a child. She had spent the years of the Second World War in Sweden as, I think, a kind of governess to relatives of Count Bernadotte’s. This makes her seem awfully posh but she was a down-to-earth daughter of a Waterford farmer. She was in Sweden in part because she had health challenges and the air there was supposed to be healthy. In her late 60s, she was re-learning Swedish through tactics like reading the Reader’s Digest in Swedish. She also visited Poland at that time because it was the only European country that she had not been in.
Her last job was as manager of what used to be the Polio Rehabilitation Centre in Stillorgan, which as the incidence of polio declined, moved more into services for people with intellectual disabilities. She was still working full-time when she died.
She was an amazing woman, a gifted organiser and manager but also interested in all of her nieces and nephews, even the awkward, shy ones like me. She was like the hub of a wheel. She kept all the spokes of our family in touch because they were all in touch with her. It was only when she died that I realised how important a role she played in our extended family.
Influence
Kathleen was not the only single person to influence me. There was Annette Monaghan, formerly secretary to a CEO. She then worked for the Dublin archdiocese in the communications office and finally, for the Capuchins. Like my aunt, she was both efficient and extraordinarily kind. Some of my most dedicated teaching colleagues over the years have been single women, beginning with Patsy Kinsella, my first deputy principal. She always stoutly declared that there was no such thing as a vocation to the single life. Life just turned out that way.
I think there is such a thing as a vocation to the single life but for many people, it is not chosen. Some are single by choice but many are single through bereavement, abandonment or other crosses. Some selflessly look after older family members and lose the opportunity to found families of their own. Some people are single but also parents.
Singleness is sometimes a transition stage. For example, many of the 1,544,862 single people aged 15 and over (41.1% of the Irish population) counted in Census 2016, will marry. Some of those may then be widowed or divorced and become single again. There were 196,227 widowed persons in 2016, comprising 5.2% of the population aged 15 and over.
Across the EU, the demographics in 2016 were even more startling. Single-person-households are the most common household type at 33%, with over 50% of households of Sweden composed of one person. Ireland has the highest population of married households with children, at 28%.
As Catholics, we often focus almost exclusively on married families with children and this can be difficult for the many who do not fit into this category. Marriage is a great blessing but given that so many people will spend either all of their lives or a large portion of it as single people, we should be paying more attention to them, not just in terms of outreach but to acknowledge their valuable contribution to parishes and communities.
Anna Broadway, an American Christian who is single, spent nearly 18 months visiting 41 countries across six continents and interviewed more than 300 people in one-on-one or group conversations from the three main Christian traditions – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.
Difficulties
Ms Broadway had thought that the difficulties she had in her own church were particular to American culture but to her surprise she found nearly all the communities she visited struggled to integrate singles into community life. She found the tendency to regard singles as ‘yet to marry’ made Christian communities overlook those who most likely would never marry – even the elderly and people with disabilities.
She did not find that any denomination had a ministry to single people that stood out but individuals were making real efforts. For example, a Protestant pastor invited single people to accompany his family on holiday.
Fr Frederick Oraegbu, a Nigerian Catholic priest whom she met in Valencia, expounded to Ms Broadway on the passage from Genesis which says that it is not good for man to be alone. This is often applied to marriage but what, he wondered, would happen if more churches took this as a mandate for all their members? I believe that it would enrich all of our lives if we saw community as being for everyone, not just traditional married families.